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Dorks for the Norks!

From a TC piece comment by ‘Bah’: “Neoreactionaries should really move to North Korea, it’s much closer to what they want for the world.”

David Brin: “Some of you know the experiment to which he refers. North and South Korea.”

Charlie Stross (in his own comment thread): “The reason I think the reactionaries are full of shit is because we have a modern-day poster child for the hereditary king of a nation that embodies all their declared virtues: Kim Jong-Un.”

(Moldbug responds to this ‘analysis’. Much more by others on the TC thread.)

If anyone finds the variant of Neoreaction espoused here indistinguishable from Juche, I’m just going to suck it up.

For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And Bitcoins for convoy put into his purse;
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.

Hey we might as well say it while its still legal to speak and moldbugs reply happens to be completely race free.And the momentum is just right its been a year about tech and freedom NSA etc and a month about tech and exit its kind of guaranteed perfect storm you are right its kicking a hornets nest but fuck them this little reparte couldnt be a better intro to the dark enlightenment and in the siths own words

Despite his infrequent posting (and with no offense intended towards our gracious admin, whose essay on The Dark Enlightenment I found both enjoyable and educational), Moldbug remains by far my favorite neoreactionary writer/thinker. I’m very pleased by both the tone and content of his response here.

One of the biggest mistakes one can make with religious fanatics is to treat them like thoughtful and intelligent entities rather than the meme-infested (and meme-regurgitating) automatons they in fact are.

There are almost certainly potentially worthwhile criticisms of the belief system(s) being forged by neoreactionaries nowadays, but what we’ve seen so far does not qualify. Productive discourse dies on the vine in an atmosphere of denunciation.

I suspect that this will all end in silliness, which is to say, the dust-up is basically done for now. Honestly, how many competitors can Urbit possibly have? I don’t imagine Stross and Brin have pencuniary interest in Docker, but how many more ankle-biters can possibly ape them? If this “criticism” goes another generation beyond them, the Progs are effectively trolling each other.

“Okay, there is only one response that piece of shit deserves: I look you in the eye and call you an evil person and a liar. Were these the days you yearn for, the ensuing duel would leave your anatomy changed, though I figure I’d have to stand in line. How utterly you depend on the rights that you claim to despise! When I finish here, I’ll have no truck with your vileness, ever again…” David Brin to MM in the comments on his latest post.

Serously, if this ‘critique’ gets any funnier I am going to need to start wearing incontinence pants to read about Neoraction – perhaps that’s their strategy? #Pissing-yourself.

Hierarchy is just a consequence of comparative advantage, the laws of physics, statistical outliers, expertise, etc. I don’t think Brin, Yudkowsky, or Alexander are missing that point in the slightest.

Rather, there’s more of a meta-discussion going on about the proper way to achieve maximum human good in the context of that natural law. Keeping those hierarchies more supple and less rigid, with meritocratic selection processes determining who gets to the top, granting at least something by way of social mobility for those still at the bottom, seems to work better. Also, a system of checks and balances, with agreed upon rules and constant reference to empirical reality, seems to help.

Pointing out that there exist hierarchies and authorities and so forth, i.e. a natural aristocracy, like it’s some kind of new revelation, seems kind of pointless. (Unless maybe you’ve never been discriminated against, in which case it might be pretty eye-opening.)

This is what im afraid the monarchy talk will get us. I think we should start making clear we are not serious but rather pointing out democracies drawbacks and that its advantages have been achieved by other means. And start figuring out how a rational government might work

aissac writes
I don’t have time to do a point by point assessment of his posts, which are mostly silly, but I think his best point is that democracy is an accountability mechanism which gets rid of bad rulers.

This is true to some extent, but the voters are heavily influenced by the media and educators (the “Cathedral”). It’s instructive to look at the Nazi Germany, which had a very different Cathedral. It’s true that Hitler didn’t have to win any elections, except for the one that brought him into power in the first place. But it’s also true that he would have won elections if there had been any, because the people, influenced by Nazi propaganda, supported Hitler to the end. This shows that you can sell almost any turd to the public if you have skillful propaganda and can silence dissent (yes, we have still have freedom of speech, no, the vast majority of people are not going to look beyond what the Cathedral tells them, so for all intents and purposes, the Cathedral can silence dissent).

– here another critique from one of our own but i mean not his point but his inadvertent point yes the cathedrals ministry of truth is calling the shots but isnt that what we advocate an elite meritocracy calling the shots no doubt they are doing a bad job but are they really doing a bad job because the proles vote or because they are brainwashed by cultural marxism and if theres a system that allows a veneer of voice while elites decide what should be done and its ostensibly meritocratic and yet possibly a safety mechanism of public accountability in the right hand wouldnt that work better than a king, whether its inherently flawed is another question that we seem to answer with its unbeatable, maybe some rational libertarian capitalistic outsourced government might be good but not really much different someones still picking contractors etc

We don’t have rule by the people, if that’s what you mean by democracy. We certainly don’t have the Democracy we had Andrew Jackson to FDR.

The Liberals were the first to admit 40 years ago we had something_____democracy, and so on. As a sop to their conscience. It’s called several and many things, so that they don’t have to call Administrative government …Administrative government. It’s great for accomplishing things that can be accomplished. It’s terrible at accomplishing things that can’t.

It’s also extremely Anti-Majority American. You can’t have good government when the government hates most of the people, no matter what government.

It’s not the system of government that’s the problem. Democratic Socialism is a contradiction in terms of property rights. Yet it succeeds in Scandinavia. Well yes they’re Scandinavian. But it also succeeds in Germany, and it succeeds in Australia. It succeeded here 1945-1965, arguably 1935 – 1965.

The system isn’t our issue, our fight. The people who are the elites is our fight. It doesn’t matter what weapon you give someone who means you mortal and genocidal harm [and doesn’t hide it]. They will do you harm.

HBD for instance isn’t an issue because of any dire problem. As Jim pointed out it can be handled any number of ways and was. HBD is quite checked in NYC for instance. It’s checked by de facto zoning laws from being an issue in every elite 95% plus white enclave. It’s a problem for the White Working Class. Why?

BECAUSE THEY HATE US. BECAUSE GOD HATES YOU.

And his Schools of Divinity turn out Ruling Divines that put this HATE into policy.

If God still loved us, we’d still have the social arangements of the early 1960s, or 50s. Jim Crow was a Southern issue. There’s no causal or moral link between that and Northern Crime…except..the Blacks were encouraged by White Elites to commit mayhem. And they did. Our problem isn’t black, brown, yellow, female, gay. Our problem is White [with some Chosen thrown in for their talent].

Our problem is elite whites. Who can’t stand the rest of the nation. The rest are totems.

Our Dire Problem is Elite Whites. Face it or stand down and fade away.

Sorry to break it to you guys, but Moldbug’s attack on David Brin does not make him look good, regardless of how impressive his prose may sound. (And he made the same mistake before with Paul Romer*.) Blaming North Korea on David Brin’s ideas is absurd; Iran kind of fits the “needs defense to retain an independent traditional culture” model… and they have more-or-less succeeded without anywhere close to NK’s level of internal oppression, despite having less support from China/former USSR and richer oil fields to seize. Brin may be overoptimistic about democracy, but he’s right about enough other things that a movement which alienates the likes of him is almost certainly doomed.

*: Romer may have ended up “failing” in Honduras, but he actually put his money where his mouth was, and it was an informative failure. Others will learn from his mistakes. That’s better than what >99.9% of do-gooders will ever achieve.

I’m not enthused by certain elements of Moldbug’s NK argument, which seems to concede far too much, but the idea that the David Brins of the world are potential allies of any coalition worth having is crazy. He’s a core Cathedralist. (Not living in the same society as David Brin is the practical meaning of my life.

[I too was sympathetic to Romer upon first seeing Moldbug drag him around the room by his ankles. On learning more about him, I came to realize that his dickitude is even greater that Moldbug had suggested.]

Brin emphasizes “criticism is the only known antidote to error” and arenas of competition. This is compatible with an emphasis on exit/federalism. Sure, he’s annoyingly preachy and self-righteous at times, and as a practical matter I have also chosen not to continue living in the same society as him, but many people capable of good “dark” techno-commercialist work will start from a similar perspective. (The worthwhile allies will mostly be younger and have less existing investment in the Cathedral, of course.)

As for Romer, being a dick is not incompatible with getting something useful done. If Bryan Caplan ever goes a quarter as far as Romer has re: actually putting skin in the game and testing his ideas on a small scale, I’ll eat my jacket. (Well, I guess “better than Caplan” isn’t saying much, or anything at all really. Still.)